packer-aws-example

An example for creating AWS AMIs with packer. For more details on packer, visit http://packer.io

This example only focus on packer, using the AWS builder to create AWS AMI

Install Packer

To install packer, please visit: https://www.packer.io/docs/installation.html

General Packer Info

To validate a packer template file, run

packer validate example.json

This will validate your example.json file to be valid and ready to build.

Create an AMI (EBS)

Go to aws-ebs-ec2 and validate the packer file (just to be sure):

packer validate example.json

The result should be something like this:

Template validated successfully.

Alright, we are ready to build our AMI:

packer build -var ‘aws_access_key=XXX’ -var ‘aws_secret_key=YYY’ example.json

This will build your AMI with packer. Be aware that this may take some time as packer spins up an instance using the defined source_ami property.

Also have a look at the passed variables. You should replace those with your access key and your secret key that you can find in the Amazon AWS Console.

If your build succeeds, you will get a console output like this:

Build 'amazon-ebs' finished.
==> Builds finished. The artifacts of successful builds are:  

--> amazon-ebs: AMIs were created:
eu-central-1: ami-a5acad0a6

You can now use your newly created AMI to spin up EC2 instances!

For more information on the packer template, check the official documentation (which is really great!).